6 Insane Laws We'll Need in the Future

#3. Rewriting the Sex Laws

Here in the age of Internet porn it's hard to know exactly what percentage of male orgasms occur in front of a computer monitor, but we're going to guess it's more than half. So if you ask when we'll have virtual reality sex, or human/robot sex, the answer from tens of thousands of researchers and inventors is, "We're working as fast as we can, dammit!"

But VR sex, as fun and guilt free as it undoubtedly will be, raises a host of problems that our creaking and often contradictory sex laws won't handle. Sure, VR sex with a computer program will be technically considered wanking, and only slightly less sad than your blow up doll collection currently is. Why would anybody care if you're boning a computer-rendered Natalie Portman in your spare time? Hell if anything, it'd kill the flesh-and-blood prostitution industry.

Gamespot? Go straight on, left at the second set of lights.

Wait, did we mention that it's a 10-year-old Leon-era Natalie Portman? Yeah, who said the sex avatars would be adults? Or even the same species? Will that be legal?

You might say, "Of course it will be," it's a victimless crime. And, you'd be wrong. Just ask Christopher Handley, who was charged with possession of child porn and bestiality porn... drawings. The offending images didn't include any real children, but just pen and ink from the imagination of some Japanese manga artist.

And of course that gets 10 times more complicated once said sex-bots are intelligent enough to qualify for human rights (what if the sex-bot isn't in the mood? Is it rape?).

Which, by the way, brings us to...

#2. Legally Redefining "Slavery"

We estimate that if all technology were to disappear tomorrow, life in the western world could sustain itself for ... about 36 minutes. Robots build our cars, vacuum our floors and fight our battles.

How long until we have robots as smart as a person? "By 2029," according to the somewhat crazy Ray Kurzweil. "It's already happening," according to the outright crazy Michael Swaim. One thing is undeniable: If the present rate of progress continues, computer processing power will surpass the brain of a man in 2030, and woman in 2038.

So make your Terminator and Matrix jokes now, because at some point we will have to consider the feelings of the robots. You'd think the obvious solution would be to simply program them without the capacity to feel pain, but remember that pain serves a purpose. If you want to build a robot that can operate in the field with some autonomy--and that's the goal of pretty much every robot developer in the world--then you have to build in a sense of self-preservation. And if you give it that, you have to give it the robot equivalent of "fear" and "trepidation" and something roughly equivalent to "pain."

So will it be considered a crime to cause "pain" to a robot? Or to force it to do something it doesn't "want" to do?

After all, we're not allowed to own people anymore, there were wars and stuff over it.

There are some who say that human-level AI is way, way off in the future, and in reality there'd be no reason to program computers to have human personalities. After all, couldn't we just stop once they reach the level of, say, animals?

Maybe. But so what. They don't have animal cruelty laws where you live? See, that's going to be the problem. We already draw the line arbitrarily when we talk about the rights of living things (boil a live lobster and you're a chef, boil a live kitten and suddenly it's a big deal) so what's the protocol when the next generation of super-smart Predator drones refuse to go into battle because they've calculated that pacifism works better?

#1. Clone Patent Laws

Let us make one thing very clear: Human cloning is illegal. As illegal as filesharing.

Ever since two Scots cloned a particularly attractive sheep to prevent Friday night arguments, the whole idea of cloning has had people arguing about the moral implications, with many countries rushing to pass anti-cloning laws before we have a chance to watch some sci-fi movie unfold on the local news.

Why is the future always blue lights?

Though, as we have previously pointed out, cloning humans wouldn't be that big of a deal unless you're intending to treat them in a way that would already be illegal if you did it to a natural born person. In that case it seems like existing laws would still apply. There's no reason clone slavery would be any more legal than natural born human slavery.

And that's good, because it seems likely that some rich guy will eventually try to grow a clone for spare parts (or an opposite sex clone for the ultimate in heterosexual narcissism) and when he fails to get caught, a few others will try.

At that point the rest of the world can either make cloning legal, or spend all their time trying to suppress the new black market for life-saving organs, driven by all those people hopelessly at the bottom the transplant recipient list.

By the way, how did Steve Jobs get ahold of a liver on such short notice?

And We'll Need New Laws Because...

We made a joke about how cloning is illegal "like filesharing," but there's another similarity: the issue of piracy. Wouldn't the Chinese like their own Miley Cyrus knock-off? Or a Lebron James for their Olympic team? Of course the clones still have to grow up, but even better: their copy will be coming online when the American version is over the hill.

Once the "make a baby from scratch" stuff we mentioned earlier comes online, there'll be a whole market for those "designs." Imagine a couple with a healthy, bright 10-year-old daughter finding out that her DNA got onto the open market and that there are 5,000 copies of her living in Eastern Europe. And now imagine all of them are mischievous types who like to use the twins to con the adults and pull shenanigans? The entire future will be just like The Parent Trap.